A friend pointed this out — calling it, with questionable gender politics in my opinion, an “ultraleftist cat fight”; Monsieur Dupont’s critical response to some recent work by the Tiqqun people. I’ve been reading a bit of this stuff, trying to get my head around communization and other such impenetrabilities. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I liked very much of what Dupont had to say. I find none of the positive content appealing (and so no quotes from any of that) but the criticisms strike me as largely on point.

Dupont quotes Tiqqun:

“Us – it is neither a subject, nor something formed, nor a multitude. Us – it is a heap of worlds, of sub-spectacular and interstitial worlds, whose existence is unmentionable, woven together with the kind of solidarity and dissent that power cannot penetrate; and there are the strays, the poor, the prisoners, etc., etc.. In short all those who, following their own line of flight, do not fit into Empire’s stale, air-conditioned paradise. Us – this is the fragmented plane of consistency of the Imaginary Party.”

Then he comments “But this is not a community. It is a gang. Or a congregation.” What it really is, is a group of students fetishizing other people – “the strays, the poor, the prisoners,” they might as well say the poor, the tired, the huddled masses….

Dupont refers to “Tiqqun’s urgent need for group consummation” and to “Tiqqun’s constant movement towards self-reference”. “The ‘we’ of Tiqqun, even as it denounces subjective formations and identity politics, nonetheless still locates in its own practice a transcendent alternative to the lives of the ‘them’, the herd, the spectators, the sometimes silk but usually plastic and always contemptible Blooms of conventional existence: ‘They are born collaborators.’ Tiqqun belong to the tradition of that greater ‘we’ which has descended through time as the small group, as the sect, which extrapolates from the fragment of the world which is itself into a potentially generalisable condition. With Hellfire Club style exultations in images of ‘abandoning ourselves to our inclinations’, Tiqqun set themselves qualitatively against the masses who are to be understood in terms of ‘Fake self-control, restraint, self-regulation of the passions….’ Tiqqun define the ‘us’ form-of-life, their civil war, as an exponential increase of excitations, a contagious sense of their ‘being carried away’. Grand gestures of relinquishment sets their ‘us’ apart from the acquisitiveness of others.

It is not difficult to identify the presence of historical traces of modernist misanthropy by which previous subject formations in the multiple traditions of Nietzsche, Lenin, Heidegger, the Surrealists, Sartre and Vaneigem (amongst so many others) have all constructed small-group, avant-garde leadership ethics in contradistinction to the cracked and passive masses of the many.”

Dupont takes them to task for this quote – “the resentful ones, the intellectual, the immunodeficient, the humanist, the transplant patient, the neurotic are Empire’s model citizens” to which Dupont writes that “Hatred of the weak and sick is a crude rhetorical device which has also been deployed by the Futurists, Lawrence, H.G. Wells, Nietzsche, Leiris. In fact it has become a Bloomesque commonplace.”

“For a ‘how to’ manual, Introduction To Civil War is surprisingly biased towards the framing of an abstract ethical theory rather than to the description of practical techniques which might be deployed in the field. There is a lengthy description of what we are expected to recognise as an unprecedented form of power which Tiqqun describes as ‘Empire’ and which should be understood as an immanent mode of governance, or an infinite, depthless network of discreet normalising techniques which realise the categories of biopower and spectacle. Empire, as Tiqqun describe it, permits no ‘outside’.xvii They insist that this Empire defines our reality and that it has supplanted the state (which it has ‘turned inside out’).xviii They also helpfully indicate that the ‘Manichaeist’ Empire which they oppose bears no more than a passing resemblance to the historically ambivalent Empire of Hardt and Negri. ‘…imperial domination can be described as neotaoist…’

The tendency for conceptual reframing of power relations obviously has its libidinal rewards; there is always a fetishistic kick to be derived from a fevered portrayal of the exquisite degree of totality. But there is also a long post-Enlightenment precedence for describing power in terms other than those which power itself deploys, and Tiqqun’s metaphor for current productive relations does enable them to conjure some just-so assertions worthy of Rousseau. And yet, the usefulness to others of the term Empire is uncertain as plainly what Tiqqun describes is not actually an ‘empire’ in any historical sense. It is a metaphorical empire of interconnectivity which has as much conceptual grip as the term ‘Multitude’.”

Dupont prefers instead to see “the social relation as fundamentally unchanging in nature throughout the period of real domination by capital (even though this domination has often undergone periodic exacerbations). In opposition to this frozen world, social critique has continued to make fragmentary conceptual tools available (even where these tools are encrusted with reifications) which make it possible to grasp and reveal the stations of capitalised existence without lapsing into either immediatist metaphor or objectivist ‘explanation’. It is still possible to get one’s bearings.

There is no Empire as such, only a continuing social relation based on the mechanism of commodity production which is subjected to fluctuating internal pressures: the rising organic composition of capital; the tendency of the rate of profit to fall; the increasingly complicated process of extracting surplus value from a shrinking industrial proletariat; the resetting of the productive relation via value destruction, crises and write-offs. These pressures, alongside resource depletion and proletarian disenchantment, require the intervention within the productive apparatus of a hyper-vigilant governance and a corresponding planned integration of all productive functions. There has been no shift in regime from state to Empire, only a cycle where phases of hyper-intensification of process are followed by periods of laissez-faire drift.”

Dupont also suggests that Tiqqun falls into the trap of thinking “that there is some sort of mission failure if there is not produced a unified general ‘theory of everything’.”

“It must often occur to such readers of experimental works that the massive conceptual machinery which has to be deployed in order to achieve a break from conventionality, the pages and pages of re-definitions and descriptive shadings, are productive only of a small output of practical and communicable knowledge of divergence. Tiqqun’s findings, and we must not doubt the great expenditure of their energies on the project, have about as much relevance to most people’s lives as, for an equivalent, Bataille’s concept of ‘The Accursed Share’. True, a few people to my knowledge have directly quoted variations on the theme of, ‘The state of exception is the normal regime of the Law’, but where that gets them, I am still not sure.”

“This tireless work of early adopters should not be underestimated, and even now these will be redeploying such conceptual formulations as, ‘The Imaginary Party is the Outside of the world without Outside’, in sometimes more and sometimes less directly practicable frameworks.xxiii But it is difficult not to conclude that Introduction to Civil War, despite the efforts of its authors to the contrary, is still too much a permissible, even exemplary, work in the style of Anti-Oedipus and (of all the fields of applicability in the world) it is probably most fitting to the radical philosophy departments of French academe.”

I’ve not read the book, I’ve got it at home in a stack of material to read, including a lot of other Tiqqun. I’ve read little of their stuff but have read some. I paste these notes and quotes up here so I remember to come back to this when I get around to reading the book. This blog exists to help me think about things I’m interested in, which means writing out thoughts, copying down quotes, and keeping lists of material to go back to later because I read a lot of material that is pretty disparate and I don’t often have time to concentrate on just one reading or set of readings. So I keep notes to remind myself of things to come back to. If I don’t do that then because of the disparate nature of what I’m reading and the limits of my memory I end up losing a lot more. That’s why I blogged about this, because I’m thinking about it and want to remember to think about it later.

of the points you posted, there are three main arguments:
1) an implicit critique of anti-sociality
2) a qualm with ‘totality’ via metaphysics and power
3) an anti-intellectual critique of philosophy in favor of ‘practical’

the first isn’t really worthwhile. tiqqun is explicitly anti-social, a lot of it leans on the heideggerian/agambenian negative philosophical anthropology. dupont’s comments don’t seem to make important contributions to this debate. moreover, while i don’t know duponts work well, i read into his comments a humanist insistence on the resilience of the subject — which is the main thrust of the tiqqun work. for me, jason read’s review seems to describe a substantial political payoff of tiqqun against dupont’s.

the second is complicated. as described in their ‘cybernetic hypothesis’ — they see totalities as constructed unitys within a differential field of dispositifs/assemblages. i see this as an attempt to retain the hegelian totality despite its obvious incommensurability with a foucaultian/lyotardian/deleuzian metaphysics. ultimately, i think it there was probably an intellectual conflict that had to be temporarily resolved and that this is a compromise position. dupont’s insistence on the problems of totality-thinking are a) don’t acknowledge the substantial reformation necessary to include totality within a largely foucaultian-deleuzian metaphysical posing and b) could have been much more ‘constructive’ in their criticism. some of this might come from the tiqqunite insistence for critique and absolute separation between things – an attempt at sectarianism regardless of its impossibility in an age of neo-liberal capture and recuperation of resistance – which in my mind, doesn’t deserve a counter-sectarian response but a reformulation.

the third is a stupid repackaging of ‘movement’ anti-intellectualism. maybe you take this sort of thing more seriously than i do. i agree with adorno that marxists haven’t done philosophy right, and abandoning it in through some vulgar reading of the 11th thesis on feuerbach will only result in catastrophe. and biographically, i know that the tiqqun folks were extremely politically active so i pretty much ignore such criticisms out of hand.

hi Andrew,
Thanks for this. I’m going to leave the 2nd for now. On the 1st and 3rd – I’ve not read Jason’s review yet, or if I have then I don’t remember it. Is that up at his blog, or somewhere else? Anyway, I’m not totally sure I know what you mean about anti-sociality. I’ve read the invisible party piece, just haven’t made notes on it. There’s a rhetoric in there that I’d call anti-social in just like a sort of common sense use of the term, rhetoric which, to be frank, strikes me as juvenile posturing, stuff written either by kids who need to grow up still, or overgrown kids of the sort that academic institutions and/or coming from privilege tends to cultivate. (That’s perhaps a bit of unfair ad hominem on my part, but it seems to me that if pro-Tiqqun folk wanted to invoke a principle against unfair ad hominem then they’d have much harsher things said by Tiqqun to account for before taking me to task here.) Or it’s just a tiresome artistic fetishism of antisocial behavior which is not actually intended in the manner to mean what it sounds like it means if read in a fairly straightforward manner. I realize that there is a sort of literary move that writers might make along those lines, where they don’t directly mean what they say. If that’s all it then I suppose my objection on this is just stylistic, but it’s still a style I find annoying and dull.

Also, about humanism or anti-humanism, I don’t mean to be disrespectful but those categories don’t speak to me at all, I think that’s much more heat than light on both sides of that disagreement. I have as suspicion that insistence on one or the other side of that disagreement is getting hung up on a debate with little present salience, that those terms may have had some important use in their original contexts but I don’t find them philosophically interesting or politically meaningful.

On the third, I don’t buy the point about movement anti-intellectualism. I’ve heard a lot of talk about anti-intellectualism and even more about it on the left, and I’m having a very hard time coming up with examples of it. If anything, in the overwhelming majority of instances, in my experience left folk are way too tolerant of material that is essentially just intellectual matters pursued for their own sake and yet which are glazed with an aura of politics. It’s hard to tell from your remark here quite what you mean but it also would be easy to read you as using “anti-intellectualism” meaning “anti-academic.” If that’s what you mean, well, maybe that *is* some of what’s going on here and in that case, yes, I do take that pretty seriously, I expect a good deal more than you do. I’d also like to point out that the piece is specifically knocking French philosophy rather than academics or intellectuals as such. I think you respond differently here in part because you are pretty far to one end of the spectrum when it comes to interest in and patience with contemporary continental philosophy (you’re further to that end than I am, certainly).

All of that aside, I think even accepting some of your point on this, there’s a baby in the bathwater of Dupont’s criticism here, which is about style. Tiqqun’s vocabulary is of a sort that makes it of a piece with types of speech and language prevalent in academic departments where French philosophy is widely read. I think it’s a fair question to ask why adopt that sort of vocabulary. If there’s no real justification for it and people just enjoy it or don’t know how to do otherwise, fair enough, but I take part of Dupont’s point to be about this. I don’t think that’s an unfair question, particularly about material that is relatively finished, in the sense of having been revised and prepared for publication.

The basic line of attack is on the question of communization. Meeting takes Tiqqun to task for having an impoverished and undialectical conception of the process- reducing communism to sharing. But its value isn’t just as a critique, and obviously there’s a wider tension within communization discourse regarding “lifestylism,” due in fact to the very terms of the discussion.

On the anti-social thing… It’s my understanding that at least in Europe, there’s a split between social and anti-social approaches (largely anarchists, I think). I don’t think it can be reduced to a few easy terms, but I think the dispute revolves around:
1) prefiguration and/or reform or revolution
2) ‘the social’ as in “social justice”, “social-ism”, “actually existing socialism”, “social ensemble”, etc, as a basis for politics
3) affirmation, negativity (‘make total destroy’, etc)

An early Tiqqun text is dedicated to this point, it’s called The Bloom Theory. According to them, middle-managers, kids of the rich, people who’ve bought into the system, etc consistently engage in self-annihilating anti-social activity. Examples: suburban school shooters, the recent IRS plane attack, the anthrad scientist. Each one of these ‘Blooms’ are usually written off, psychologized, criminalized, etc. They want to argue that Bloom anti-sociality is political speech and that anti-social political activity can come from anywhere, not just angsty teenagers or people with ‘nothing to lose’.

‘The Call’ is maybe most explicit in making a distinction between ‘the social’ and ‘the communist’ (or maybe more elegantly, between socialization and communization). And Claire Fontaine’s piece on Readymade Artist explains the Agambenian/Rancierian side of the argument more — ‘the social’ is an analytic category to describe ‘social relations’ of control (disciplinary, biopolitical, etc), while ‘communism’ exists as an alternative model for relations.

The crux of the argument comes down to a few points, for me:
1) All three groups (Tiqqun, IC, CF) advocate the ‘communist’ against the ‘social’
2) There are important strategic differences between the three groups approaches.
3) The ‘weak’ position would argue that the social should be abandoned (fleed, escaped, exodus, etc etc) in favor of the communist.
4) The ‘strong’ position would argue that the social has to be attacked in order to gain the possibility of communism.

I think that the idea of considering anti-social behavior as political is useful and necessary. A bad reading would say that such political approaches are suggestive, but that’s as stupid as suggesting one should become black in order to fight racism. Blooms are by no means something to become, they are products of the current moment. Obviously there much more to it than this, but the ideas is that there is some novelty to the ongoing cannibalism of the bourgeois through anti-sociality — people acting _against_ their class interest and the class interest of others. Ultimately, our own political positions will be strengthened if we reconfigure politics to include the regular, routine, and unpredictable subjects of anti-social behavior. (which, intellectually, follows the middle work of ranciere well)

As far as the other two go, i’m willing to let them somewhat slide for now. I think I agree that it’s more “anti-academic” that it is “anti-intellectual.” As I’ve mentioned this to you a few times already — the Tiqqun folks recognized the problem of limiting their audience through how they wrote. That’s one of the reasons “Call” and “The Coming Insurrection” were written so differently. That’s why Tiqqun 3 was supposed to be a movie.

I would be surprised if Dupont didn’t already know this. Dupont’s criticism strikes me as strange, seeing as he considers the Situationists as one of his big three intellectual pillars. I think it’s easy to say anti-academic or anti-french philosophy stuff with one hand, and to reading and draw on it with the other. This type of inconsistency is usually obvious, irritates me a bunch, and feels opportunistic.

I had breakfast with a new friend this morning who knows all this better than I do and who said that your comments here were helpful in thinking this stuff out. So, thanks for this.

I’ve got a copy of Bloom Theory but haven’t read it yet. I plan to and will post notes and hope we can discuss it. Likewise for The Call, I’ve got a copy of that in my bag at the moment actually, and I’ll look up that Claire Fontaine piece (is it the one listed here – http://www.clairefontaine.ws/text.html – as “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A few Clarifications”?)

I may have missed something, you say “all three groups” and list IC and CF – IC is the Invisible Committee, what’s CF? And if you wouldn’t mind, could you tell me a bit about (or point to something I could read, maybe I should just check wikipedia?) on the make up, milieu, and overlap of these groups? I ask becaue think I’m conflating people in my head and am missing the chronology here – as you say, you’ve noted that these people changed how they wrote. I’ve not read the more readable pieces, and I’ve been reading what I’m reading here with little or no regard to when it was written, my mistake.

On the obviousness and opportunism of anti- French theory cheap shots, I think you have a fair point. I think my response to those depends a lot on mood.

When you say “As far as the other two go, i’m willing to let them somewhat slide for now”, I don;t know what “the other two” refers to, can you clarify that please?

About the substance of this anti-social etc stuff…

“middle-managers, kids of the rich, people who’ve bought into the system, etc consistently engage in self-annihilating anti-social activity” This activity “is political speech and (…) can come from anywhere, not just angsty teenagers or people with ‘nothing to lose’.”

I’m not sure what to make of it, unsurprising since I haven’t yet read the major articulation of this. At this point I’m skeptical, though I’m probably failing to see the difference between “this is a product of the system” and “this is laudable” or worrying about others failing to see the difference.

When you refer to this as “people acting against their class interest and the class interest of others”, presumably others in their class and allied classes, I’m not sure. I’m not sure I see this as, in broad strokes, in opposition to the interests of their class. It may be (from the examples, clearly is) failing to follow their individual interests as conditioned by (or, as we’d expect from) their class position, but that seems different to me than opposing the interests of their class. I can’t think of a better parallel but consider working class alcoholism vs scabbing or opposing activities of the class in struggle out of bad ideas/politics. The first is bad for the individual and in a sense bad for the class/against the class interest, the second is directly opposed to interests in a different way.

“our own political positions will be strengthened if we reconfigure politics to include the regular, routine, and unpredictable subjects of anti-social behavior.”

I’m not convinced of this. I think our understanding of social reality will be better by us understanding better what actually happens (and so, insofar as this stuff happens as described then our understanding is improved by this) but I’m not sure about it strengthening any political positions. I generally am unsure about how much and when analysis strengthens political positions – clearly somewhat and sometimes, surely not always though. Hmm.

Anyway, thanks again for this.

take care,
Nate

ps- sorry your comment got moderated. I don’t really understand why the blog does what it does. It moderates anything with a link and I think sometimes it moderates longer comments and comments which are written in another file then copied here (that’s how I write a lot of mine, because I’ve had too many deleted by accidentally hitting the back button).

I’m finding this conversation very useful. In particular, pushing me on points that I didn’t elaborate clearly because I wrote it stream of consciousness. Let me try to take a little more care with this response.

The main point I’m reading these texts for:
A form of composition that isn’t dependent on self-identification or consciousness.

An article I have never been able to get out of my head is Michael Hardt’s “Withering of Civil Society”, which I read as a junior in college (it’s an elaboration of part of a chapter in Labor of Dionysus). In it, he argues that 18/19c conceptions of the ‘social’ and the politics that emerges are hopelessly caught up in strategies that may have been useful in their time, but that modes of governance and social control now anticipate and even deploy for their own use. [the article was published in “social text”]

One of the faculty that I work with is an Italian who uses a mixture of autonomist and post-colonial theory to consider Africa. He has an elegant problematic that brings nearly all of my last decade of ‘activism’ into perspective:
In what ways are the newest social movements deployments of the western nation-state model by other means? [And in an African or post-colonial context, how do they extend the modernizing projects that the colonial authorities began?]
Especially given the context of social movements claiming to offer ‘better’ or ‘more sensitive’ governance models than the state or capital, I am consistently challenged to think of what is distinctly different about their approaches than a ‘socially conscious corporation’ or a ‘human needs oriented state.’

Background:
We know what traditional left activism looks like. It takes a few different forms — a vanguard party advocated for class (or identity) interest, a social democratic mass movement, community and/or populist base-building, a variety of anarchist de-centralizing approaches, and a few more if i took the time to actually typologize them.

Key parts of each one of those approaches is to 1) identity a constituency, 2) create a structure in which those people can advocate for their interest, and 3) to create ways affiliating with others to enhance strategical benefits. In the process, groups often have to identity blockages to their success and find ways to ‘overcome’ them (whether by negation, subversion, marginalization, or overwhelming them). The Hegelian approach I am trying to avoid should stand out clearly here, all as syntheses of antimonies resolved to a higher plane: the Party rules over (educating and disciplining, instilling consciousness in) the working class, etc etc.

Positive Approach:
In the event we want to retain a lot of the same terminology, but rework it to avoid the need to overcome problems by ‘resolving them to a higher plane’. This, by most accounts, has been the anarchist project. For instance, in what ways can affiliation avoid the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and instead employ a model of collectivity that creates a positive interaction without creating a synthesis (or a synthesis that is reflexive)? So there is consensus decision-making, spokescouncils, federations, platformism, etc etc.

What I find useful in Tiqqun is an attempt to think composition/affiliation otherwise. Idiotic anarchists sing the praises of the Unabomber. Most of us reject him as being an anti-social misanthrope. There is an undoubted complicity between us and him. So is there a third way? What is the secret solidarity between anarcho-communists and anti-sociality?

This is where The Coming Insurrection’s language of ‘resonance’ has become so suggestive. Previously people talked about ‘memes’ but the baggage from Dawkins ‘selfish gene’ is difficult to separate from the importance of ideas being contagious. In Tiqqun’s ‘Cybernetic Hypothesis’, they mention Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotics of ‘insinuation’ – whereby words and concepts are valued for their ability to catch on and spread, rather than for their logical content. This is the Spinozist idea of power that was found most prolifically in Fouacult but is now found more disseminated in recent cultural theory work on ‘affect’. The bottom line being: how do the actions of people who aren’t in direct communication, don’t ‘organize’ together, but undertake similar actions build a compossible politics that resonates through important layers of society (the media spectacle, the bodies politic, etc etc).

There are a few important elements, as outlined by the constellation of approaches that emerged from the Tiqqun work:
1) A Party that never becomes a Party, but is still a form of affinity:
This is the ‘imaginary party’.

3) An inside/outside politics where the inside relations are communist (and qualitatively evaluated as such) and external relations are anarchist

There is much more to their approach than this, but those are the one’s I’ve spent the most time with so far. More soon.

As to the ‘line by line’ of your comments:
1) The history of Tiqqun:
A group of young people in France took part in the 97-98 Movement of the Unemployed. It was an experiment in the whatever singularity. [one member who would go on to form half of Claire Fontaine, had been involved in politics in Italy and therefore knew Agamben and his work well] There is an article in We Are Everywhere about the struggle. The demands were ‘impossible’, the actions involved lots of reappropriation, and they were met by surprisingly little repression. A group of people from this movement came together and started a collective.

The collective had many manifestations and members. They came out with a number of texts (Bloom, Young Girl), and then finally two self-entitled journals ‘Tiqqun’ – which is a name they gave to an event (not the collectives name). To the extent that they saw themselves as an assemblage, they took Foucault’s notion of the author to the extreme, when combined they were no longer individuals but a chorus of voices writing on a constellation of concepts. The first journal had an ‘editorial committee’ with names attached to it. The second did not.

There is some other biographical information that I’ve found out about, but there’s only a few more scraps of it that I find important. First, most of the members of the group were educated in elite french institutions. Second, the group maintained a strong connection to ongoing struggles (some of them, very militant). And third, personal dynamics often influenced the direction of their work.

In 2001 the group split. I’ve heard a million different reasons. One nouvelle obs article says it was over disagreements over how to react to 9/11. Group dynamics has to have been a big reasons. Others say it was because of a choice to ‘life the theory’ differently. I do know that they recognized that their approach to that point was intelligible mainly to academics. They really wanted to be relevant to comrades rather than scholars and so had discussions about finding a style/medium more suited to general audiences.

When the group split in 2001, one part of the collective moved to places in the French countryside that have are still politically communist. The recent journal piece in Vice probably gets it more or less right. It has been alleged that these groups compose the Invisible Committee – which has been talked to death about because of its legal implications for Sarkozy’s ongoing terrorism charges against them. From what I gather, a lot of the people involved there are former anarchist/squatter/militant types who have grown older and are looking for something more long term. This group retained Tiqqun’s affiliation with La Fabrique, a small press that published radical philosophy and political texts. There are a some small disputes over the republishing of Tiqqun that became public, I have a post on it on my blog entitled “Tiqqun Apocrypha”.

One major member split off and founded the art group Claire Fontaine. They do art installations and lots of textual production (most of it not on their website). Their philosophical focus overlaps mainly with Tiqqun and their intellectual influences in order of importance are probably: Foucault, Benjamin, Autonomist Feminism, Agamben, and Ranciere. I like their work better than the Invisible Committee because the feminism tends to temper a lot of the practical questions of internal group dynamics, especially in times of repression. Additionally, it doesn’t have any of the ‘back to the land’ stuff (which friends have tried to argue isn’t in the IC stuff, but I’m still not sure…).

Two films came after the 2001 split. Bernadette Corporation’s “How To Get Rid of Yourself” is absolutely amazing. I have a few short comments about it (comparing it to ‘Breaking the Spell’) on my blog. Invisible Committee’s “The War Has Just Begun” is very Debordesque. I find it pretty boring but you might find it more exciting.

The Bloom Stuff —
I haven’t worked out the Bloom stuff enough to place it. It is in very close proximity to Ranciere’s work on democracy. As the argument goes — sociological classification of people is part of the disciplinary cartography of modern governance. Its most intense articulation is now biopolitical governance, and even ostensibly radical sociologists like Bourdieu are guilty of extending its logic. Ranciere’s The Philosopher and His Poor, for instance, argues that Bourdieu’s theory of Distinction does keeps people incarcerated within their class — as exhibited in French Socialist use of Bourdieu when instituting multicultural education policies in the 80s.

I don’t think this should be too terribly controversial. According to a traditional Marxists, Frank Parkin’s ‘distributionalist’ Weberian critique of Marxist class theory doesn’t focus on the ‘hidden abode of production’ where all the magic happens. Similarly, sociological accounts of class seem to black box the relations of production which is where everything important lies (and i would be remiss not to note that this is where D&G get all their traction).

So the problematic: why is it that rich kids are often the most radical? why is it that the working class doesn’t always act in their class interest? and as the Bloom Theory goes — why do some of the petite bourgeois feel like they are such terribly desperate circumstances that they are willing to kill themselves and take as many bourgeois with them as possible?

The argument put forth by Tiqqun (and probably Ranciere) would be that to psychologize, criminalize, or otherwise explain away these ‘exceptional’ cases is to empty them of their political potential. For instance, the recent suicides at the Apple supplier factories in China can be _politicized_ (not exactly petty bourgeois, but bear with me). It becomes immediately intelligible to anyone with even the most shallow understanding of classic workplace struggles. Why are they committing suicide? Time, speed, pay, benefits, conditions, etc etc… But why did Ted Kaczynski bomb professors (why not compare him to Alexander Berkman?)? Why did that Texan fly a plane into the IRS building (why not compare it to the hundreds of government building bombings in the late 60s/early 70s)? Why do suburban teenagers shoot up their high schools (and what about postal workers)?

So on a simplistic level, we can see that just about everyone is subject to the same sort of anti-social behavior. For the remnants of the US working class whose production is still socialized, their ‘anti-social’ behavior is immediately translatable into a point of struggle. But for all of those whose production isn’t socialized (or using other language, who are ‘socialized’ in the similarly vulgar sense of being stupidly connected without any affiliation and without meaningful decision-making capacity), what happens when they commit anti-social behavior?

The end result is the ‘human strike’ that Claire Fontaine is still working on. A way to connection revolt to the plane of biopolitics rather than the workplace, which is overdetermined.

Maybe this is enough for now. All the best. Thanks again for the great discussion Nate.

sorry for the addendum comments… but i was thinking. maybe one way to describe the tiqqun project is an attempt to construct the metaphysics of a mode of production capable of overtaking the capitalism one.

Ridiculously ambitious but I think they did a better job than most. And no matter how much I might disagree with them on certain points, I can’t fault them for it and I find strong affinities with their reworking of some ideas…

A quick note on this excellent, if byzantine discussion. I think the term “anti-social” has to be read on many registers. First, the fascination with anti-social behavior — school shooting, going postal, and so on — by otherwise ordinary, unremarkable and seemingly docile petty bourgeois citizens (Joe Stack, say; “Bloom” in their language) is really only present in the first of the two volumes of Tiqqun, that is, in “Theory of Bloom” and in some other texts that haven’t been translated or have just begun to circulate. There are all sorts of strands that run together in this, from the invocation of the “strange acts” of the anti-nomian Jewish messianic sects of the 17th century to the “lives of infamous men” proposed by Foucault to the “gratuitous” act of the Surrealists (the 1920s, the decade when Bloom emerges). By the second issue of Tiqqun — Introduction to Civil, This is not a program, Cybernetic Hypothesis, Terrible Community, and so on — there is a shift toward a certain politics of “incivility” if you like, but one that seems to me to echo more classical figures of “illegality” (say, the auto-reductions and “diffuse guerilla war” of Italy’s “creeping May”).

The key, though, in my opinion, is to place this notion of an anti-social in the context of what Andrew rightly points to with Hardt’s “withering of civil society” (Tiqqun seems to prefer the term “implosion” rather than the Leninist withering). For Tiqqun, there is a whole network of concepts — state, society, economy, citizen, civility and so on — that really have a short shelf-life, some few hundred years, from the 17th century to the early to mid 20th century. We are and have been witnessing, they argue, the ruination of this entire constellation of concepts and analytical tools. This is really where the heart of the matter is.

As for Dupont, I find the text a bit confused and/or irrelevant, to be quite honest. And I quite like Nihilist Communism, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I think some of their texts are weaker than others, and am increasingly unsatisfied with “Program.” Just want to re-set, for my part, the frame of discussion a little.

“Ranciere’s The Philosopher and His Poor, for instance, argues that Bourdieu’s theory of Distinction does keeps people incarcerated within their class — as exhibited in French Socialist use of Bourdieu when instituting multicultural education policies in the 80s.”

In the introduction written by Kristin Ross to Ranciere’s “The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation”, their is an explicit reference to the two ‘socialist’ ministers under Mitterand, the hegemony of that lil’ shit Bordieu in the french education departments, etc. The text itself, minus Ross’s introduction, is a bit of a story about Joseph Jacotot, exiled from France with the restoration in 1815, and founder of one of the most subversive anti-hierchical schools in the 20’s-30’s. ‘Everyone is born equally intelligent’, ‘an illiterate father can teach his child to read’, and other fun little slogans abound. I’d say the book is about: Ontological equality as truth-statement.

Whereas with “The Philosopher and His Poor”, Ranciere takes to task certain philosophers from Plato to Marx. The thesis of the book is that The Philosopher always does that game of Representation, locating a place of and for the Other, and letting it know what’s good for it, where it should do it’s thing, what it should be touching, and what kind of consistency it really has. A very soft but hateful text against the Master’s Discourse.

I’m a little tipsy and about to watch some films with friends. It’s nice to see these discussions on this blog, and it’s also been nice to come across your Blog. Perhaps I’ll try to contribute to both of these spaces a little more consistently in days to come.

I’m not sure what to say about this. A few thoughts. I don’t see why those categories should be just called Hegelian. Terms aside, I’m curious what constitutes mobilizing a category. It seems to me that presence of a term doesn’t necessarily mean presence of a concept (for instance, talk about classism in some circles is not using class analysis as I use that term and concept), and the absence of a term doesn’t necessarily mean absence of a concept. Someone said to me, it might have been you actually, that there’s a version of Tiqqunism which makes a group identity out of the ostensible and vitriolic rejection of identity claims.

“18/19c conceptions of the ’social’ and the politics that emerges are hopelessly caught up in strategies that may have been useful in their time, but that modes of governance and social control now anticipate and even deploy for their own use.”

I’ve read that Hardt piece and it didn’t speak to me. I also want to point out that historical outmodedness is as least as much of a ‘traditional Hegelican category’ as any of those you listed above. What it also leaves out entirely, I think, is context beyond a very broad and vague sense of “in their time.” This is less a criticism of you than of Hardt, really, as I think you’re laying a view that sounds like how I read him. Also – if we’re going to talk about several hundred year old conceptions and their outmodedness then I’d really like to hear how Spinoza is exempted, and what the (I think metaphilosophical) criteria are for identifying what is and isn’t outmoded.

“1) identity a constituency, 2) create a structure in which those people can advocate for their interest, and 3) to create ways affiliating with others to enhance strategical benefits. In the process, groups often have to identity blockages to their success and find ways to ‘overcome’ them (whether by negation, subversion, marginalization, or overwhelming them).”

I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but – at the level of generality you describe here, this 3 step process applies equally well to the anti-Hegelian perspective you’re advancing, or at least to any exponents of it that I’m aware of.

“What is the secret solidarity between anarcho-communists and anti-sociality?”

I don’t see this a compelling problem. That’s not to say no one should pursue it – I believe in a universal right to interests, after all – but I don’t see what the criteria of recommendability are, why should others (like me) take up this question if they/we/I don’t have intellectual intuitions that dispose them toward this question?

“how do the actions of people who aren’t in direct communication, don’t ‘organize’ together, but undertake similar actions build a compossible politics that resonates through important layers of society”

That’s interesting to me, and I’d be keen to think about this through historical analogs in the history of radicalism and social movements (since ours is an era of more, faster, and easier direct communication than ever before for populations like the ones you and I belong to, I would hazard a guess that the phenomena you’re describing has many precedents). I don’t know that the philosophical framework here is necessary for any of that, though. I can see (only sort of, to be really honest) how that framework might help lead you to those questions. The framework’s not the only route to those, and I’m unsure about the utility (or at the very least, the necessity, the recommendability) of the framework for dealing with those questions.

I really appreciate the biographical detail, that’s interesting and helpful. I’ll try to keep in mind what you say about the stylistic reflections they did etc, as I think I mentioned I’ve not been keeping track or bothering to find out the chronology of any of the writings, sort of reading it all in a flat time, which means that some of my stylistic annoyance is probably me pushing on an open door. (Likewise for Jason’s comment about how certain themes emerge and fall away over time, like the stuff on anti-social behavior, my inattention to chronology here is making me miss all that, so thanks for point that out Jason.)

When you say that part of the group moved somewhere that people “are still politically communist” I’m not sure I follow – do you mean tied to the PCF or something? (I’ve not read the piece in Vice, is that online anywhere?) I’ll look at your “Tiqqun Apocrypha” piece, thanks as well for that.

“sociological classification of people is part of the disciplinary cartography of modern governance”

“why is it that rich kids are often the most radical?”
That seems like a pretty strong overstatement to me, I’d prefer it reformed as “why do certain sect(or)s of the ostensibly radical left have such an overrepresentation of rich kid”

“to psychologize, criminalize, or otherwise explain away these ‘exceptional’ cases is to empty them of their political potential.”

I know I’m being unfair since I’ve not read Bloom yet (I will, I promise! I have it printed out!), but I think the burden of proof is on the claim that there *is* an important political potential there, of a sort that is more present there than elsewhere. Otherwise this is an interest, no more interesting or pressing than any other.

“A way to connect revolt to the plane of biopolitics rather than the workplace, which is overdetermined.”

I’ve not read that human strike piece either yet. Eventually. I know this is all very abbreviated (thanks again for taking the time) but it seems to me “the plane of biopolitics” vs “the workplace” is a false dichotomy. This is unfair of me but I’m going to just lay it out as something I want to keep in mind as I read further. A fair bit of this strikes me, as a lot of philosophy does, as retroactive elaboration and justification of prior held intuitions. So I expect that there’s a level of inexperience among these cats with workplace struggle tied to life course and social position, and probably tied to serious problems in dominant workplace-oriented perspectives. Then there’s a philosophical project of reflection in/on those intuitions and experiences and the projects elaborated within them.

Jason writes that “For Tiqqun, there is a whole network of concepts — state, society, economy, citizen, civility and so on — that really have a short shelf-life, some few hundred years, from the 17th century to the early to mid 20th century. We are and have been witnessing, they argue, the ruination of this entire constellation of concepts and analytical tools. This is really where the heart of the matter is.”

That’s helpful, thank you. It’s not particularly surprising given that some of them were educated in elite french universities as Andrew said, and given their obvious philosophical backgrounds and the particular philosophers they seem to be reading.

As posed here I find the unconvincing to say the least, and it seems to me to have a strong affinity with the sort of Hegelian stuff that Andrew wants to get away from. And… this is awfully wonky, but…. with what is the identification of conceptual shelf-life made? Presumably with some sort of concepts. If those meta-concepts still function, why is that? There’s an implied framework here, whether a thorough philosophical one or just a narrative of intellectual history I’m not sure, that it’d be good to see elaborated. Among other things, there seems to be some notion of fit here, between concepts and contexts, which seems ill-advised to me.

Jason, about the Dupont, I’m not wedded to it. I found it helpful for marking some things that I was uneasy about in the bits of Tiqqun I’ve read, and that I hadn’t been able to articulate yet.

Yadira, always nice to hear from you. You mention Ranciere, it’s been a while since I read him but I like his stuff a lot. I’d be interested to hear what, if anything, he’s had to say about stuff related to any of this.

I’m not sure there’s a lot to add right now. I think we’ve pretty much staked out positions and have explored them in a decent amount of depth. Further exposition would probably be best postponed until more reading and considering has been done.

To tie up some loose ends:
Yadira: You are correct that the Ignorant Schoolmaster is much more about pedagogy. Additionally, you are right to characterize the first two sections of Philosopher and His Poor as being about Ancient Greece and then Marx. However, the third section of Philosopher and His Poor is about contemporary Marxist, dealing mostly with Sartre and Bourdieu. Because Ranciere writes in a very classically philosophical style, he is resistant to talk about the ‘applied’ aspects of the philosophy, even if it obvious that it is his target. I think the afterward clears up Ranciere’s argument in PHP nicely, taking the time to relate it to other works written around the same post-Althusserian period through Mesentente.

The way I heard this period of Ranciere’s work characterized seems quite useful — after a deep involvement with Althusser, Maoism, and worker politics, Ranciere makes his famous break. He then plunges into the archives, spending eight long years trying to find ‘the autonomous working class discourse.’ But he finds none. Rather, he develops an elegant but idiosyncratic notion of democracy and politics-as-exclusion which cuts across the whole tradition of philosophy. He first presents his work in the Nights of Labor, which is panned by some as being too anecdotal. It is then followed by Philosopher and His Poor, which presents the more general philosophical argument. There is then a few books which explore singular figures that articulate these ideas — LB Gauny, Ignorant Schoolmaster, Short Voyages. I haven’t read Short Voyages yet, but it’s next on the list of Ranciere books.

Additionally – to clarify my approach, I want to see what form of politics would attendant to recent work on power – which is not to denigrate previous approaches like workplace struggles (or even suggest some sort of break like ‘moving beyond them’), but to say that I’m drawing my energy and inspiration elsewhere. For instance, I just read Massumi’s “Parables for the Virtual” which made a really good case for a Deleuzian notion of power and how to rework major concepts in American cultural studies. In this approach, education and intellect is far less important than style and intuition. Or moreover, momentum is built by constructing transversal resonances between bodies and rhythms rather than clarity and efficiency. Tiqqun’s work lends itself to these approaches, I have gotten a lot out of The Cybernetic Hypothesis and the Sonogram of Power for instance.

Once I have more of this synthesized into shared terms, I’ll be excited to share it with you. Until then, thanks for the stimulating conversation.

Thanks Andrew. I just sent you an email – sorry your comment got moderated. In some of this I think we just have deeply different intellectual intuitions – I find Deleuze leaves me cold, in style always and in substance usually. Occasionally when translated into a duller anglo-american or germanic philosophical register ;) I can agree with it but it rarely excites me. Fair enough, though, different strokes for different folks, mostly, except… I think that often lurking in the background in conversations like this is not-quite-argument as different unstated intuitions are brought to bear or expressed, and there’s often a subtext about larger philosophical perspectives/systems. In certain conversations it’s often really hard to avoid that kind of thing – a disagreement or a disconnect in one register being tied to another register. I recognize that and yet find it frustrating sometimes – it’s actually something that Deleuzian mileus (milieux? I don’t know the plural of that word) have strongly in common with Hegelian ones, at least within marxish kinds of discussions. An odd affinity, maybe not quite a philosophical agreement but very much a commonality between intellectual cultures that often take themselves as strongly opposed.

Anyway, thanks for the conversation and links. Quick question, where is “sonogram of power”? I’ve got the cybernetic piece along w/ a lot of other Tiqqun printed out (just read The Call and the piece on Terrible Community, notes soon), I don’t recall the sonogram piece and a quick google search didn’t turn it up.

I’ll keep that Deleuze/Hegel thing in mind. I think most of that debate is expressed in the of the whole Deleuze/Badiou(Hallward) interaction – which I feel the Deleuzians have adequately clarified their response to. And in my own intellectual development, I came to Deleuze through Foucault. And while there are aspects of Deleuze that I disagree with or am ambivalent towards, there are only a few small things I’d ever fault Foucault on. However, I found Foucault very useful on power but didn’t feel he gave me enough direction for my activism. Honestly, I think I still know my Foucault better than my Deleuze.

And the Sonogram stuff — yeah, that’s it. The word ‘puissance’ is actually the title. And as I’m sure you know, the whole pouvoir/puissance potere/potenza thing has been giving translators trouble ever sine the distinction has been introduced because we don’t have similarly contrasting words in English. This translator decided to mark the difference as power/potential, other does Power/power, etc etc.

2.) It should prostrate and cut open its belly before the feet of the laws of history, knowing that the role of the mileau is both determined by (and invariably powerless before) capital itself. This political seppuku will fill the pages of history to come as the most noble thing the “radicals” have ever done for us, the wage-slaves.

3.) Should they succeed, we say, however unlikely as it is at this juncture in material development, these self-styled “radical subjects” would find only the most efficient paths to becoming the new bosses. They are vanguardists by any other name.

4.) Their suicide would be the only honest and fair thing they could do in our service. It would ring truer than any of their self-masturbatory exploits, which comrade Dupont duly takes them to task for.

5.) Only when a new means of production has been developed will communism become possible. Until then, all consciousness is reactionary.

Martin,
Your reply is charmingly odd. As such —
1) is funny.
3) is highly suspect.
5) is false, and were it true it would apply equally to your consciousness as expressed in your points, and so would undermine your own points.

You are correct that even my own consciousness is subject to this verdict. This is why, as a nihilist, I do not exercize it. I do not try to change the world, for this is how we perpetuate its problems.

The closest thing we can be to “progressive” or “revolutionary” is to demolish the machinations of all who view themselves in such a manner, for they are the genuine reactionaries.

There is no positive or affirmative activity to commit to, nor is there a goal to be obtained; there is nothing that can be done to “speed up” the coming of the next successive social order.

All attempts to do so will end in ruin for the pro-revolutionaries at best or acculturation to the existing order at worst. The latter is most common for those who do not endorse insurrectionary tactics; but their irrelevance to the affecting the present is synonymous with their dead or imprisoned counterparts.

The history of the conscious revolutionaries in modern capitalism might be best compared to the struggle of monks during the Dark Ages. Alternatively, one might also compare us to the abolitionists in the northern American states prior to the Civil War.

Neither achieved their objectives, mostly being mocked publically as “radicals” and “evildoers”, sometimes being killed simply for opposing the “common sense” of the times.

If we should commit to some activity, in the end perhaps out of boredom and dissatisfaction with existing reality, it should be done free of illusions of victory. We will not win. We can not win. We can only self-negate with no hopes of this leading to any sort of self-affirmation.

The radical subject is nonexistant, or if it exists, it has no purpose but to die.

Martin,
I’m on the go, but four things quickly.
One, okay so you’re a nihilist. I’m not. Your claims here presume your nihilist position. Since I don’t accept that position, your claims here mean little more to me than any other claims that follow from a position I find uncompelling. For instance, I’m an atheist. As such, claims that presume religion don’t really have any impact on me. In order for me to take any of this on board, you’d have to lay out and advocate for your nihilist position.
Second, if you’re right, then why bother to say it? Your position is self-undermining – it’s a performative contradict. Someone who you criticize for doing and saying this and that makes a mistake no worse than the one you do in voicing your criticism of them. Actually, you make a worse mistake: they don’t have the truth of your nihilist position and so, according to the framework you lay out here, they mistakenly labor under the impression that what they do and say is worth it and may be effective. You, however, recognize that none of this will be effective. In that case, your mistake is worse — you recognize what you take to be this truth and yet you defy it and say this stuff anyway. That is to say: according to what you’ve laid out here, articulating your position is a worse mistake than that made by the people you criticize. It’s a bit odd as well, because the assumption you’re making seems to be that if other people are convinced of your arguments they will stop saying and doing what they’re saying and doing. And yet, you are (presumably) convinced of your argument, but you continue to say what you say.
Third, you draw a parallel with N American abolitionists, but from what you say here I suspect that you’re wrong about abolitionists in N America. To give just one example – abolitionists basically started a civil war in Kansas in the early 1850s, which intensified and led up to the raid on Harpers Ferry, which was a major contributing factor to the outbreak of The Civil War.
Fourth, though I think you’re wrong about abolitionism in one sense I think your choice of abolitionists and monks is a very pleasing one: many abolitionists and, one assumes, most monks were motivated by religious zeal which found gratification in moral rectitude, absolutism, and a sort of asceticism. I realize that some revolutionaries fit this description as well. It strikes me that your nihilist position is an ideology which perfects rather than rejects those traits. Which makes me smile, so thank you.